I wrote the original piece over five years ago, pre-9/11 and after my first visit to the Museum of Tolerance. I cleaned it up and am reposting it here, a day after my second visit:
I finally had the chance to go to the Museum of Tolerance today. My expectations were perhaps too high–it didn’t match up to the profound influences on my life, such as the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, Schindler’s List and the book Treblinka. I did come away pensive about the holocaust and the pain and sorrow that some people are capable of inflicting on their neighbors.
One of the themes in the Holocaust exhibit was that common, everyday people were responsible for the mistreatment and murder of millions of jews. Even when soldiers were told that they could volunteer not to participate in the execution of Jewish women, children and elders, the most still chose to point their rifles at these helpless innocents and pull the triggers.
The victims of this unfathomable tragedy were also common, everyday people–bakers and bankers, soldiers and scientists, teachers and tailors, school children and grandmothers. The lives of eleven million of German neighbors–people who deserved to read the newspaper over a cup of coffee each morning, to laugh with friends and family over a Sunday afternoon meal, to tuck their children in at night with a story, a prayer and a kiss–all of these lives were cut short. Some wasted away, victims of starvation and disease in the overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, others killed by bullets to their heads while standing in cold ditches dug with their own hands, and many more choked on poison gas as they stood naked clinging to each other in terror in large concrete “showers”.
Not all subjects of the Nazi regime turned a blind eye to this attempted genocide. Polish farmers sheltered their Jewish friends in their barns, feeding and clothing them. A Muslim in Yugoslavia hid his Jewish boss in his home at the risk of his own life. Catholic nuns in Warsaw took the little sons and daughters of Jewish families and distributed among their orphanages.
The liberators, those who brought down the Nazi slaughterhouses, were also common, everyday people–mostly Americans and subjects of the British crown who were college students, truck drivers, teachers, mechanics, sons and husbands and fathers. Many of these never went home again.
I think a lot about how I and my friends and neighbors–ordinary, everyday people, all of us–would react in similar circumstances. Things seem all right now, but what if we were to suffer economic catastrophe again, and a fascist regime took advantage of the insecurity and rose to power on the rhetoric of hatred?
This is why I feel that we have to be on guard constantly, lest we become perpetrators or victims of such inhuman crimes.
11 responses so far ↓
1 Jonathan // Aug 29, 2006 at 9:27 am
Great post! This point CANNOT be stressed enough because of its profound importance: average, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things — either horrible or good. This means you, me, and everyone reading this post. So it stands to reason that we should guard at all costs against that nature inside us that is capable of influencing us to do the horrible and not the good — a topic that has been consuming all my writing and thinking lately. It appears to me that this same nature is what most hinders us in our own spiritual journey, and therefore is our greatest adversary and is worthy of exposing and understanding before any real progess can be made.
Nowadays, I’m quite careful too, almost ridiculously so — whenever I sit down to write or think seriously about a subject, I’ll go though my checklist to see if the source of my motivation is coming from that nature or not before continuing. After all, am I not the one who is most responsible for making sure I don’t become like one of the ordinary German soilders in WWII? When the time and the situation for doing the extraordinary comes like it did for them, what will I be capable of? Now that we know what can happen, why leave it to chance?
2 Denae // Aug 29, 2006 at 10:59 am
I believe that is why it is so important that we do not give up any of our civil liberties in our pursuit of criminals. It is a “slippery slope” and at a certain point you look around and wonder how you ended up in a pile of poo. From everything I have heard from Germans (non military) that is what happened to them. Everything was done with the best intentions but they chipped away at their original laws with the intention of being a better stronger Germany and before they knew it, horrible crimes had been committed. The means do not justify the ends.
Every person is capable of so much, no one is insignificant and we must all make our lives count. It can be very daunting thinking of how much harm we can do, like the proverbial bull in a china closet. On the other hand, we are capable of bringing so much joy and happiness. I wish that more people were introspective enough to realize that and do something about it
3 Watt Mahoun // Aug 29, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Yes, “the banality of evil“, with perhaps one of the primary motivating factors: conformity. What terrors we are capable of doing in the pursuit of conformity and acceptance raises some serious questions about what the highest needs and aspirations of humanity really are.
Perhaps its a good thing that we are all motivated by different things to different degrees…or are we? If you are a perpetrator or liberator, this may be two sides of the same sword. I’m growing more and more averse to finding fault with others when I strongly suspect that the difference between devils and saints may be largely one of circumstance. How else does one explain the power and universal potency of repentance?
4 Miko // Aug 30, 2006 at 7:23 am
Denae: sound familiar? The slippery slope affects us all the same (republican, democrat, green), but it takes normal people to realize we’re slipping and speak up. Mr. & Ms. Pilgrim: I thought of this while we were there but didn’t know all the words, so I encourage everyone to check out the wiki entry.
Thanx for letting Funky Monk & I tag along
5 pilgrimgirl // Aug 30, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Thanks for the link Miko. Powerful stuff, indeed. I’ll make sure to share this one with my students
6 Johnny // Aug 30, 2006 at 9:22 pm
I experienced something similar when I visited the holocaust museum in D.C. Never looked at it the same again…
This may be too off topic, so pleez forgive. In my critical theory class we are talking the role that a predominately technological worldview brings. One of them is that human beings begin to be seen as quantifiable. One contemporary example we have is the “collateral damage” in technological warfare. The early authors of critical theory saw this uniquely manifested in WWII. Technology and murder coincided horrifically in WWII, not only with the Jews, but also with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Never before was death so calculable.
I mention this because often we are told to guard against fascism by protecting civil rights. But the fascism that efficiently conducted genocide on the Jewish people had more than just the renunciation of civil rights at its origin.
7 Ryan // Sep 1, 2006 at 1:13 am
Speaking of Polish farmers sheltering their Jewish friends in barns, there’s a great book titled “Alicia - My Story” by Alicia Appleman-Jurman. Non-fiction, and a quick read. Compelling and descriptively unfathomable, at least for me. Next time I’ll be fit to go to the Museum of Tolerance with you guys.
8 Todd // Sep 4, 2006 at 8:44 am
I’m not sure if this is really germaine to your larger point, but it for me personally it is important to remember that when the camps were liberated at the end of the war, they did not let the homosexual men (those with pink triangles) go, because they were seen as criminals and were transfered to prisons where they remained sometimes for years after the war. See Heinz Heger’s The Men with the Pink Triangle or Richard Plant’s The Pink Triangle or the documentary film Paragraph 175.
9 John // Sep 4, 2006 at 10:29 pm
We missed you, Ryan–we’ll be sure to set up a return visit!
Thanks, Todd, for the info–were these men in areas liberated by non-Soviet allies?
10 Miko // Sep 10, 2006 at 7:22 am
I ran across this the other day & thought it an interesting commentary on the place of the Nazis in our societal memory in phrases like “grammar Nazi” or Seinfeld’s episode the Soup Nazi. Does anyone here care to comment on why grammar Nazis are okay but ampersand apartheid isn’t?
11 John // Sep 10, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Don’t forget “feminazi.”
Hitler has an interesting mythical place as well. Both secular and religious can agree that he is Evil Personified. But we don’t toss “Hitler” around like “Nazi.” There’s no Soup Hitler.
This is a great question, Miko, and I’m going to continue to puzzle over it. If it doesn’t generate much talk down here, I may have to turn it into a post, with your permission.
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